Monday, September 22, 2008

This is one of the few games that I've been excited about for a long time. The last Starwars game I bought was "Starwars, Lego". If anyone knows anything about Starwars games, they are hit and miss.

I must say that playing Unleashed for the first hr or so, I was in lightsaber bliss. Not only because you swing around a lightsaber, but (spoiler alert).......you play the first level has Darth Vader. Hes a heaping tower of power. You have storm troopers to help you along, but by the time I got to the end of the level, I had either chocked them all, or thrown them off a cliff. IT was fun to practice my force powers. I had a great time playing the first level.

Well, the reason for playing has Vader, is he is looking to kill a jedi but also finds the jedi's son and takes him to train him has his own apprentice. Then you spend the rest of the game has an adult doing Vader's bidding and uncovering an elaborate scheme by the empire. Its a decent story, good enough to fill in the bits between the movies, 3 and 4.

The good. ITs great to choke people and drop them off ledges. There are quite a few force powers and combos that you can unlock to improve your skills has a sith/jedi. You can shoot eletricity, throw your lightsaber, add electiral attacks to your saber swings. Various Force pushes, grabs, lifts, stacking. Thats right, stacking, I spent 20 min in the tie fighter hanger bay, trying to stack tie fighter to reach a secret hologram. It was pretty entertaining. After each level was over, it give you a bonus for finishing the game under 15-30 min. Mine was 45-over an hr. I liked to fart around and see what I could do with the enviroment.

Which takes us to the next part, you can pretty much grab anything and throw it, or manipulate somehow. Its pretty satisfying to throw jawa's 100 ft in the air and try to bat them outta the sky has they fall back down. Which is another part I enjoyed about the game. I found myself interacting with the environment and locals more than playing the actual game. And it all helped me get used to the controls.

The controls were fine I guess, the camera did weird things every now and then and i would get stuck at times when I didn't need to get stuck. Fighting bosses I found myself getting stuck on the edge of a platform and couldn't see what direction to go, so I jumped and dashed across the ground and over the ledge to my death. That was very annoying.

This brings up the enemies, they are pretty good AI, but they are relentless, if they knock you down and they surround you, kiss your ass good bye, they will continue to hit, shoot and blow the crap outta your ass till you dead, making it next to impossible to escape. I had many a times that I was hammering the dash button trying to get away from a gang bang of storm troopers.

Also, I didn't like the block button, it was fine for minor attacks, but hitting the button, there was a delay. He didn't block right away, so most times,you see something coming towards you and you hit block. Too late, you are already hit, even though you hit the block button, I guess getting into block stance takes a sec or two to do.

Bosses, I guess there are strategies to killing them, but all else fails, run away and do hit and run maneuvers. Most enemies/bosses could be killed using cheap tactics. One boss, I literally had him stuck behind a barrel and he was in walk mode and was trying to walk around it, and I was on the other side whapping him in the head with my lightsaber until he died. Which I didn't mind, because he was hard and at that point I took what I could get.

Bonuses, there are all the typical Starwars stuff, artwork, models, stories, different outfits for the main character. You can change the color of your lightsaber to your favorite color. I was always partial to green. You could get special gems to go into your lightsaber and enhance certain powers. It was all good.

Overall, the game was ok, it had its things that were frustrating, but not enough in my opinion to warrant it being a bad game. I enjoyed all the things you could do in the levels, and it wasn't just a hack and slash game. There are times that you really had to strategize the best way to take out a group of enemies. It was fun and not just for Starwars fans, I think most gamers would enjoy this. At least give it a rent.